Top 20 Times American Dad Went Too Far
#20: Becky’s Cruel Fate
Hoping to make real and not virtual memories, the Smiths ended up on an actual cruise for the episode “The Vacation Goo.” But that went wrong when most of the family and Stan’s love interest Becky had to hide out in a cave. Unfortunately, the latter ends up fatally crushed by rocks in a cave in. Later on, the hungry family is debating how to solve their food problem. The four of them eventually agree to make a meal out of their fallen comrade. To make matters worse, it turned out that the Smiths weren’t ever in danger. In the end, both Becky and the audience could’ve been spared from this needlessly cruel and bleak plotline.
#19: Fishing For Pain
In one episode, Stan builds a dam to serve his selfish needs. By the end of the story, Francine finds out and destroys the structure. Her decisive actions led to a conflict between her and a few lake people. At first, the fight scene seems like it’ll be another fun parody. But it gets graphic once Francine uses her rod in a brutal way. Since we can’t show you what happens, enjoy this imagery of Ms. Smith fishing while we tell you that she graphically targeted a lake person’s eyes. Francine even went after his “Pan’s Labyrinth” eyes! While we’re all for her defending herself, her unexpectedly brutal actions gave us a scene that was a little bit more than we bargained for.
#18: B-12 Deficiency
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With Steve’s legendary boyband B-12’s return in “Russian Doll,” things got off to a sad start with a mystery assassin taking out the members. While we don’t see every death in detail, we learn about the slaughter as time goes on. In the end, the final fate of the killer Abraham H. made for the most graphic scene. The villain appeared and tried to take out Steve. However, the kid’s messy teenage bedroom unintentionally caused Abraham to be launched out of the window. And let’s just say the villain didn’t land on something soft. While the thought of a musical serial killer was grim enough, the violent end of this plotline was especially gruesome.
#17: Stan’s Teen Avatar
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Many parents can probably relate to wanting to be closer to their children. And most would try most things to achieve that. But take note, don’t do what Stan Smith did unless you want to be potentially scarred for life. The patriarch steals a page from “Avatar” and projects his mind into the body of a teenage girl. While inside of this body, he makes some mature promises to Steve. It looked like this plotline would go way too far after the kid and the avatar get close at a dance. Thankfully, Francine intervenes before anything happens. Unfortunately, Stan didn’t seem to learn anything from this disturbing plan.
#16: The Whole of "American Fung"
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This entry doesn’t cover just one moment but the whole episode due to how far the creators changed things up. “American Fung” features fictional entrepreneur Fung Wah purchasing the rights to the show. And while he claimed he wouldn’t change it, he does in a series of bad ways. Wah is introduced as a cartoon to Roger, Hayley, and Steve. He becomes a Mary Sue-esque character that’s fawned over by the others, finds solutions to problems, and discovers treasure. The episode’s switches between live-action and animation were jarring. And the ending with the show being sold to A Chinese business with a knock-off of Mickey Mouse didn’t help. It’s no wonder this episode is considered one of “American Dad!”'s worst.
#15: Roger’s Cruel Lie
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To get back at Steve for getting a cookie that he wanted, Roger convinces the kid that he was adopted. As part of this sick plot, the alien destroys the young Smiths’ baby photos. Steve becomes so convinced that he’s been adopted that he makes a gross choice. Since he no longer believes he’s related to Hayley, he gets uncomfortably close to her. But even that act isn’t enough for Roger. The alien finds a family who lost their son and sends Steve to them. For a moment, the parents thought they found their missing kid. But Roger cruelly crushes their hopes. It’s important to remember that multiple people were traumatized just because Steve ate a cookie.
#14: Elbow of Doom
After Roger runs away from Francine as she’s being mugged, he decides to become a police officer. Unfortunately, the alien becomes a corrupt cop that works for a man named Migliaccio. Stan eventually collects evidence of Roger’s misdeeds. But when Migliaccio finds out about the blackmail, he kidnaps the patriarch. The corrupt lawman then orders Roger to take Stan out. However, the alien defies the order and fights back. Roger ends the fight with an elbow drop that would make Randy Savage jealous -- and a little bit sick. While we can’t show it here, trust us when we say there’s not much of Migliaccio’s head left when the alien is done.
#13: Stan Frames Francine
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In “Four Little Words,” Stan gets tired of his boss Bullock keeping him late at work. The patriarch thinks he can stop the long hours by introducing his superior to Francine’s friend, Melinda. This plan works…until Bullock mistook her for an enemy and killed her. To cover up his mistake, the boss planned to assassinate Francine. Stan decided to get his wife out of danger by framing her for the murder of her own friend. Francine was so guilt-ridden that she went to another country to dedicate her life to charity work. As terrible as Melinda’s death was, seeing Stan gaslight his own wife into thinking she was a murderer was worse. We understand why Francine didn’t even want to touch her husband after this.
#12: Roger’s Obsession With Haley
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Roger’s always been a tad unstable. But the episode “Love, AD Style” took it to another level. When Hayley sang at his bar, Roger became obsessed with her. His fixation only gets worse as the episode goes on. After Roger corners Haley in a hospital, he knocks her out and takes her to an isolated location. If all that wasn’t bad enough, things got worse when her husband Jeff arrived to save Hayley. The alien tries to look more human by subjecting the spouse to some horrible skin surgery. Roger’s nonchalant attitude about the laundry list of crimes he commits to get closer to Haley was pretty disturbing.
#11: Kisses the Dog
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Due to a past trauma involving having to finish his childhood dog, Stan was adamant that Steve couldn’t have a faithful hound. However, after meeting Kisses the Dog, he changed his tune. But the pup gets into a horrific accident involving pirate cats and a hot air balloon. Yeah, we know that’s a weird sentence. In any case, instead of letting Kisses go, Stan took him to a veterinary equivalent of Frankenstein. The mad doctor steam-punked a monstrous Kisses back together. But thanks to a dream involving his previous dog, Stan saw he’d crossed a line and finished off the Franken-pup. His extreme method was fitting for such an over-the-top episode.
#10: A Water Slide Too Far
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Considering watching this moment causes EVERYONE to cross their legs and wince, it deserves to be here. In the episode “A Ward Show,” Stan and Francine are vacationing at a water park. But they get bored after doing everything within a couple of hours. Eventually, they decide to spice things up in an overambitious way. Franchise decides to wait at the bottom of the slide as Stan throws himself after her. Unfortunately, they collide below the waist and everything goes red. A hospital scene showed they survived the brutal impact. But the image of their horrific injury remains stuck in our heads.
#9: Forbidden Love
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Roger is an alien. Klaus is a German man stuck in the body of a fish. It may have taken over a decade, but didn’t everyone expect these two to hook up? Okay, maybe this is the weirdest coupling we have ever seen on-screen. Although Roger has hooked up with everything and everyone under the sun, he gets desperate for love, and resorts to online dating. An honest mistake leads him to Klaus, and the ensuing intimate scenes… well, we wish that we had brought a barf bucket with us. You’d never think that a cartoon can make you gag like that.
#8: Stan Goes Blind
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We all know Stan is a strong and brave patriarch. However, he is also deeply sexist, shallow, and carries around some very old world views. When it becomes clear that he loves Francine for her looks and expects her to consistently take care of herself for him, she finally decides to relax and let herself go. The ensuing results are pretty horrific, but since Stan can’t take a clue and show his wife he loves her for who she is, he does that only logical thing he can think of. He removes his retinas to save the marriage.
#7: Chiseled
While the abuse Hayley goes through is nothing compared to Meg Griffin, there have been some questionable parental moments. Case in point: when Hayley gets wrongfully accused of destroying a mural, and is hunted down by the entire town, her loving father saves the day, Stan-style. He knocks her out and performs reconstruction surgery on her face. The surgery itself is stomach-churning, as well as hilarious, but the disaster doesn’t end there. Hayley comes out looking like Frankenstein’s monster from a surgery she never asked for. A bad case of ‘Father doesn’t know best.
#6: Kidnapping Boyfriends
Over the years, we have seen the multiple ugly sides to Stan Smith, and wondered how he turned out this way. The infamous episode, “Oedipal Panties,” decides to answer some of these questions, as it deep dives into Stan’s relationship with his mother. Disturbing to say the least, we learn that Stan has made it a habit of kidnapping his mother’s boyfriends and making them disappear. Wanting mommy all to himself, this is an unhealthy relationship for the ages. The cherry on top? That nightmarish bath-time song that Francine, nor the audience, will ever forget.
#5: Surrogate Parents
Ultra-conservative Stan Smith does not hide his strong beliefs and Christian values. It was only a matter of time before his homophobic side came out to play, what with loving couple Terry and Greg living down the street. Stan has been pretty civil to them, in his own way, until they decide to have a baby. Along with the incredibly offensive stereotypical one-liners, Stan really crosses the line when he takes their newborn son just so the infant wouldn’t be raised by two fathers. Do we really wanna forgive Stan at the end of this one?
#4: His Civic Duty
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Poor Steve, so innocent and naive. This episode was the definition of nervous laughter as we watched a sex offender named Randy move into the neighborhood. He makes his past clear to his neighbors after he arrives. However, Stan is completely oblivious when Steve and his friends are swept away right under his nose. They end up spending an uncomfortably large amount of time hanging with Randy. The extraordinarily dark circumstances surrounding this plot led to a number of skin-crawling scenes that were hard to laugh at. In the end, the show’s attempt to joke around with Randy led to the creation of one of its darkest plotlines.
#3: Stan's CIA Double
The episode “Pulling Double Booty” is all levels of messed up and confusing. First, Francine is horrified to find Stan and Hayley in a very questionable position. Thankfully, it turns out that her daughter is actually making out with a body double named Bill. But the lines are crossed all over again with this fake Stan pretends to be the real one around Francine. However, the gross plot doesn’t end there. Eventually, Stan pretends to be the body double and continues to stay as close to Hayley as Bill was. It’s almost impressive that this patriarch and his body double managed to cross the line so many times with just one horrendously misguided scheme.
#2: Camp Refoogee
No group is left behind by Stan’s insensitivity and cluelessness. Wanting his son to have a great summer camp experience, Stan accidentally sends Steve to a refugee camp in Africa. It’s truly hard to believe that Stan, a CIA operative, can be this obtuse. Like when he goes to rescue Steve, and ends up trying to turn the refugee camp into a real summer camp. Making fun of refugees is bad enough, but calling a violent attack by local rebels a panty raid really makes the humor hard to fathom.
#1: Giving Release
Since Roger is one of the most outrageous characters on the show, we’ve grown to expect him to shock us at least once an episode. But this scene went far even for him. Playing pranks and manipulating people is what Roger does best, and convincing Stan that their new horse needs regular… manual stimulation, takes the cake. That brief garden-hose moment, when we were all tricked into thinking the show had definitely gone way too far, resulted in over 100,000 complaints and a $25,000 fine from the FCC.
